Sooo when will Tory Starmer be restoring the whip to the greate politician of our generation? :) If he can accept a Tory, why not a left winger...

 

Are we talking about a Brexit-loving, double-loser, centrist-intolerant former leader critical of the current leadership that has gifted the ultra-right-wing control over the UK for the foreseeable future (as I predicted from the start)? The one that voted against innumerable Labour whipped-votes over decades and was still accepted into the party and invited to stand as leader? Cos that might be something to do with it...

You meqn the one who did better rhan any centrist?? Who saw rhe biggest increase in Labour votes since Attlee?? The only reason he didn't have TWO landslides was, a.) Brexshit temporarily buoying the Tory vote, B.) Mass hysteria and brainwashing from thr ENTIRE British state AGAIN lifting rhe Tiry vote unnaturally high.

 

Oops. Even so, he still pulled in more votes rhan any centrist!!!

 

He tried to work with those cenrrists. Had rhem in his cabinet, unlike Starmer, even though he didn't want them, acceptes their proposals, ans all they did was sabotage, sabotage, sabotage...

 

And he has PRINCIPLES. He was always on the eight side of history. That is why he deserved ro be leader. It isn't football. It isn't school, where thw gody two-shoes teacher's pet mp should automatically be leader!!! Jesus christ, the mentality of tou centrists!!!!

 

Btw if it was me as the leader, I'd have done a purge before rhe FIRST election and replaced the whole lot of fake Labourite centrists as candidates. Angela Eagle? Gone. Starmer? Buh bye. Why aren't these career centrists just Tories?! As is, they are complaint opposition, accepted by the media and British state to give us the PRETENCE of democracy. Tory or Tory lite is hardly a choice at all. Neolibetal or Neoliberal... No wonder people voted for brexshit if this is the choice we have at every single election. No hope.

 

You might be right about ONE thing: Starmer kicked him out so as not to show him up, when he and the cebtrists are voting for any olf claptrap. Corbyn will always follow his principles.

I regret to inform you that Starmer's dishonesty from his leadership campaign is still going strong. I'd have never supported him if he'd said anything like this during his leadership campaign.

 

@1494366578921590790

 

and Angela Rayner has just been pulled up for saying that people suspected of being terrorists should be shot first and ask questions later in case you had any doubt that Labour's current team will be authoritarian shitheads in government.

 

I want the Tories out of power just as much as the rest of you. However:

 

>It is no use lying to win an election against the liars, in fact this casts further doubts on your honesty and probably does not help

>It is no use getting the Tories out to replace them with a team that may just be better at hiding corruption and immorality

>It may be of use getting the commentariat class onside. However there are those among them, like Times and Telegraph journalists, who we should actually be pretty worried about if Labour starts to look good to them.

 

Some cheery thoughts that even if Labour wins next time, things aren't magically fixed especially with the Labour front bench the way it is.

I never trusted him and never supported him during his campaign ;) I was all for Burgeon or Rayner or Corbyn.

Reports that Labour is threatening to withdraw the whip from McDonnell, Abbott, Burgon, Lavery, Sultana and six other MPs unless they withdraw signatures from Stop the War Coalition statement. This is kamikaze stuff from Starmer.

 

Reports that Labour is threatening to withdraw the whip from McDonnell, Abbott, Burgon, Lavery, Sultana and six other MPs unless they withdraw signatures from Stop the War Coalition statement. This is kamikaze stuff from Starmer.

 

I fail to see how? Yes it will piss off the Left, I'm sure it will, but it's silly stuff from those MPs, who have obviously gone against the Party line. I get the need to not want war, but it's a real blind side of the Corbyn stalwarts. NATO is not the enemy here. Iz put it brilliantly in the Russian thread. It looks like they have withdrawn their signatures now from what I have read.

Yeh they have, i don’t see the issue with having a different point of view. It’s also possible to be anti Putin and critical of NATO as well. If nothing else it’s good for democracy which is allegedly what the Uk is involved for.

Yeh they have, i don’t see the issue with having a different point of view. It’s also possible to be anti Putin and critical of NATO as well. If nothing else it’s good for democracy which is allegedly what the Uk is involved for.

 

But the coalition asks NATO to stop its expansion? So yes, of course it is OK to be anti Putin and critical of NATO, but it is misguided politics. Why give Johnson an opportunity to lay slate at Labour? Habe the thoughts privately by all means, but putting the weight behind a petition on the day Russia invades Ukraine is horribly misguided imo.

I agree with these MPs almost without reservation on every other issue, how unfortunate that they are giving their political enemies a stick to beat them with at the worst possible time.

 

Pacifism for sure and I commend them for making a stand there, but Stop The War have made comments about NATO "aggression" that are woefully out of place at the current time. Anyone more concerned with that than Putin's aggression should not be part of the left.

The MPs have all toed the party line and withdrawn their support for the letter and so won't lose the whip.

But the coalition asks NATO to stop its expansion? So yes, of course it is OK to be anti Putin and critical of NATO, but it is misguided politics. Why give Johnson an opportunity to lay slate at Labour? Habe the thoughts privately by all means, but putting the weight behind a petition on the day Russia invades Ukraine is horribly misguided imo.

 

Johnson will always slate Labour no matter what anyway. By that narrative we should all be centrist liberals without any differing opinions than anyone else which is really what Johnson wants anyway and of course he will still attack Labour.

 

Of course it’s bad timing but that’s not the point I’m making.

Re: comment above claiming Corbyn always being on the right side of history:

 

The Labour Party has always had lefties that love the old USSR, they were eventually kicked out and flooded back under Corbyn who always criticised the west and took the view that the poor old Communists were peace-loving badly-done-by's by the cruel greedy west. Young voters had not lived through the Cold War times and thought the new world order was here forever, and Corbyn was a hero with his socialist policies. Labour has always believed in fairness, Corbyn didnt invent it and it's not gone away now he's not leader. He showed his true colours the moment he demanded immediate triggering of articles to leave The EU the day after the referendum. Sadly for him, the resulting increased Socialist agenda didn't quite come about for the UK. The reverse did.

 

from the blasted internet a very one-sided account:

 

 

"The thread shows how Mr Corbyn has always been reluctant to criticise Russia - even when it was the Communist USSR, pitted against the West in the Cold War.

 

The Labour leader has been heavily criticised for his refusal to point the finger at Vladimir Putin for the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal on the streets of Salisbury.

 

a collection of quotes from his long career as a backbench MP, as recorded in Hansard, the official record of all Commons debates:

 

Mr Corbyn repeatedly insisted the USSR was no danger to the West and praised Communist leaders for seeking peace.

 

In July 1984, Mr Corbyn praised the regime for its childcare policies, saying: "The Soviet Union makes far greater nursery provision than this country."

 

Two years later, he claimed the Soviets were more committed to peace talks than the West.

 

Mr Corbyn said: "In recent years, there has been no occasion on which the Soviet Union has walked away from negotiations."

 

He added: "We are constantly fed a diet of pro-American propaganda from the Government, through the newspapers, and a diet of anti-Soviet propaganda."

 

In a bizarre exchange in 1988, the hard-left MP appeared to suggest the USSR should hold Britain to account over the UK's human rights record.

 

He asked Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe if at a recent meeting "representatives of the Soviet government mentioned human rights abuses in this country and the number of people held in prison in Northern Ireland".

 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the USSR was fighting for survival, Mr Corbyn suggested the country should not be considered an opponent of the West.

 

He said: "It is sad that the minister and many Conservative members seem to be pretending that the Soviet Union is our enemy.

 

"I do not believe that it has ever intended to invade Western Europe."

Mr Corbyn added: "A country that lost 20million people in the Second World War fighting fascism is not about to embark on a war against anyone."

 

He repeated his claim in 1991 when he told the Commons: "I was never one to support the idea of the Cold War - the idea that there was an imminent threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe."

 

A few months later, he suggested the Soviet economy collapsed because of an "arms race" between the USSR and the US, rather than because of Communism.

 

After the fall of the Communist regime, Mr Corbyn apparently became more critical of Russia - slamming the government of Boris Yeltsin for not allowing free speech.

 

But he also criticised the attempts of Nato to expand into Eastern Europe by inviting countries such as Poland and Estonia to join.

 

Last week, Mr Corbyn called on Theresa May to present more evidence before blaming the Putin regime for carrying out the Salisbury attack.

 

He suggested the Russian-made nerve agent novichok could have been stolen by the mafia, and warned that hitting back risked creating a witch hunt."

 

So, I look forward to Jezza coming out and saying he was wrong about Putin all along, and that he'd like to reconsider his past verbal support for some regimes. Poor old Vlad suffering a witch hunt for his perfectly innocent tourist-loving staff who were trying to see salisbury spire and just happened to kill a resident in the crossfire to get at an enemy of the poor innocent peace-loving Vladimir, who's main dodgy policy was financially contributing to the hated evil Tories. Presumably cos the cash should have gone into alternative coffers.

Socialist policies are heroic, and Corbyn IS and always will be a hero. Yes, he is a pacifist, ans no, we "lefties" don't give Russia or the USSR a free ride regarding its aggression. Sooo you can stop that strawman shite right now, extreme centrist ;)

or as I view it blinkered support of someone who is deluded. I'm a pacifist too, you don't get to "own" that as an argument. I'm never in favour of war, and that includes every conflict the UK has been involved in during my lifetime. Corbyn clearly supported the old USSR/Russia and played down the threats through his entire career. Heroic socialist policies were not invented by Corbyn. Most of the great ones we have were introduced by a Labour Government after a War in which millions were murdered by an evil dictator. The passive approach didn't stop anything happening. Poland was still invaded. Quite the reverse, germany was joined by 2 other evil dictators, mass murderers.

 

Words are meaningless if all you are doing is slapping a wrist. Wrist-slapping doesn't stop wars. Truth is the only reality. Fake news and propaganda are the tools of the corrupt and the inability to recognise what is a difference of opinion between people speaking from the same page, while supporting the bleedingly obvious baddies is not helpful.

I don't see any of the above quotes from Corbyn as an endorsement of the USSR. Most were probably pointed critiques of our own poor government at the time lacking in caring for its people. The USSR would care for its people - especially given this was Gorbachev's USSR, not Stalin's. Corbyn has been pretty critical of Putin's regime just like everyone else, just it's also been stymied with his pacifism that he follows to a fault.

 

But socialists are, or should be above hero worship and while Corbyn was certainly towards the democratic side of socialism in his actions and thoughts, he wasn't always the most effective at delivering them and at times he showed susceptibility to be influenced by authoritarian tendencies.

 

I would, for example, still resist excessive defense spending and call for unilateral disarmament, because it is the right thing to do long-term (unlike some commentators who have been chiding Western Europe for 'slacking' on defense spending these last 30 years). Not while Putin's in charge or while countries are threatened by an outsider, in the moment, their rearmament is fine, but once Russia has a more amenable regime and tensions are lowered, I will resume that line.

There’s loads of people giving examples on Twitter of times Corbyn has been critical of Putin in comparison to Blair and he simply doesn’t respond to them and gives his own examples of Corbyn saying the wrong thing. Everything is so hyperbole these days, one of the reasons we are where we are!

I don't see any of the above quotes from Corbyn as an endorsement of the USSR. Most were probably pointed critiques of our own poor government at the time lacking in caring for its people. The USSR would care for its people - especially given this was Gorbachev's USSR, not Stalin's. Corbyn has been pretty critical of Putin's regime just like everyone else, just it's also been stymied with his pacifism that he follows to a fault.

 

But socialists are, or should be above hero worship and while Corbyn was certainly towards the democratic side of socialism in his actions and thoughts, he wasn't always the most effective at delivering them and at times he showed susceptibility to be influenced by authoritarian tendencies.

 

I would, for example, still resist excessive defense spending and call for unilateral disarmament, because it is the right thing to do long-term (unlike some commentators who have been chiding Western Europe for 'slacking' on defense spending these last 30 years). Not while Putin's in charge or while countries are threatened by an outsider, in the moment, their rearmament is fine, but once Russia has a more amenable regime and tensions are lowered, I will resume that line.

 

Unilateral disarmament is just asking to be taken over, economically through threats, if not actually. It's extremely naive to think that human nature is any different in 2022 than it was in 1922, 1022 or 2000BC. Putin isn't a one-off and then we can all sigh with relief that we are safe forever more. Nuclear disarmament, for example, if Putin and other troubled nations refuse to give them up and democracies do give them up, then you can kiss goodbye to democracy. Or are the threats (even with nuclear weapons on t'other side!) just empty? Cos history shows that power mad dictators are an actual thing. We had one try to usurp the democratic process and encourage murder in the USA last year!

 

I am perfectly willing to give Corbyn the benefit of the doubt that he's not in favour of power-mad dictators. He's just utterly naive and simplistic, and wishy-washy reactions to bullies just encourages more bullying. I support his aims to stop the West bullying (it does happen), but I don't support the theory that giving up weapons makes life idyllic in any way, given endless proof to the contrary by homo sapiens. MUTUAL giving up of weapons by all would. That's what every nation has to work towards, but I don't see any evidence that that is going to happen this side of hell freezing over...

Massive difference between pro-Russia and pro-Putin. Deliberately ignored by those who seek to promote an agenda.

 

 

But don't worry, we've got Boris instead who is massively massively pro-Kremlin endorced oligarchs.

 

Unilateral disarmament is just asking to be taken over, economically through threats, if not actually. It's extremely naive to think that human nature is any different in 2022 than it was in 1922, 1022 or 2000BC. Putin isn't a one-off and then we can all sigh with relief that we are safe forever more. Nuclear disarmament, for example, if Putin and other troubled nations refuse to give them up and democracies do give them up, then you can kiss goodbye to democracy. Or are the threats (even with nuclear weapons on t'other side!) just empty? Cos history shows that power mad dictators are an actual thing. We had one try to usurp the democratic process and encourage murder in the USA last year!

 

I am perfectly willing to give Corbyn the benefit of the doubt that he's not in favour of power-mad dictators. He's just utterly naive and simplistic, and wishy-washy reactions to bullies just encourages more bullying. I support his aims to stop the West bullying (it does happen), but I don't support the theory that giving up weapons makes life idyllic in any way, given endless proof to the contrary by homo sapiens. MUTUAL giving up of weapons by all would. That's what every nation has to work towards, but I don't see any evidence that that is going to happen this side of hell freezing over...

 

Yes and I am inclined to agree. Of course we would all love to live in a world with no war and no nuclear weapons, but disarmament makes us incredibly weak and vulnerable. It only works if everyone does it and that's not going to happen. As much as Trident is lambastest for being a waste of money by certain quarters, and yes while the money could be way better spent on better services in an ideal world, the Trident system at least ensures if anyone tries to attack us, we will attack back. History has a horrid cause of repeating itself, to disarm fully would be naive and make us incredibly weak and vulnerable.

Unilateral disarmament is just asking to be taken over, economically through threats, if not actually. It's extremely naive to think that human nature is any different in 2022 than it was in 1922, 1022 or 2000BC. Putin isn't a one-off and then we can all sigh with relief that we are safe forever more. Nuclear disarmament, for example, if Putin and other troubled nations refuse to give them up and democracies do give them up, then you can kiss goodbye to democracy. Or are the threats (even with nuclear weapons on t'other side!) just empty? Cos history shows that power mad dictators are an actual thing. We had one try to usurp the democratic process and encourage murder in the USA last year!

 

I am perfectly willing to give Corbyn the benefit of the doubt that he's not in favour of power-mad dictators. He's just utterly naive and simplistic, and wishy-washy reactions to bullies just encourages more bullying. I support his aims to stop the West bullying (it does happen), but I don't support the theory that giving up weapons makes life idyllic in any way, given endless proof to the contrary by homo sapiens. MUTUAL giving up of weapons by all would. That's what every nation has to work towards, but I don't see any evidence that that is going to happen this side of hell freezing over...

 

Well yes, we agree then. I'm saying that that's what we need to work towards and the international condemnation towards Russia is an encouraging sign that most nations will not tolerate war and would not pursue defense were it not for the actions of rogue states and actors that they need to protect themselves from. As is, for the moment, European rearmament.

 

And every nation needs to work towards changing their system so that dictators cannot get in power, and constantly be on guard against it. Russia perhaps needs the most change. Removing Putin will do nothing if Russia doesn't change its system to allow for democracy, and similarly, though less obviously pressing, flawed democracies like the USA and the UK are, through their acceptance of the rich, powerful, corrupt interests and winner-takes-all style of "democratic governance", vulnerable to jingoistic governments elected on a populist bent that could lead to more wars.

 

If every nation had a European style coalition government (PR) with regular fair democratic elections and was constantly economically and culturally linked the way nearly all of Europe already is, I think disarmament could be reached. As things stand, war within the EU is pretty much an impossibility, and if Russia is brought into the fold, then the entire continent would theoretically be safe. This is why an EU army never bothered me, if it existed it would be the minimal defence needed to protect an otherwise safe continent. It's all part of the internationalism that (imo) good socialists should be advocating for and it's the way to make their pacifism eventually work.